I was browsing through Barnes and Noble and I found a book on Detroit history, it had this:
It is an advertisement for an electric car with a range of 80-100 miles, it is from 1916. It is nice to know that after 92 years, landing a man on the moon, inventing the computer, cellphones, and building super-sonic jets modern electric cars have a range of: 50-160 miles. You could replace the picture and price and run this exact same ad in a magazine today.
Altamente Sospechoso 
I’m not sure of your point here, but if it’s that EVs are not much better than those of 1916, you’re way off base. Two years ago, I drove an EV that ran 0-60 in 3.6 seconds. Interestingly, the range on one charge for this car was over 300 miles.
For over 5 years, I’ve been driving a Toyota RAV4 EV that is faster than the equivalent gas version. Best of all, the energy I use in the battery is made from sunlight. Further, my car runs today exactly the same as the first day I got it. And there has been practically no service beyond rotating the tires.
Given all the problems we have because of oil, I’d think any patriot would rather drive on cleaner, cheaper, domestic electricity instead of dirty, expensive foreign oil. If you’d like to join the good people working to convince the auto makers to offer Americans the choice to drive clean, then please go to http://www.pluginamerica.org and read all about it.
Fee fre to write to me if you have any specific questions.
Paul
paul@pluginamerica.org
I think electric cars are definitely the future, they have many advantages as you have stated. The point of this post was a humorous jab at the lack of progress in electric cars. I know there has been progress, the electric cars of 1916 were probably more comparable to todays golf carts then the EV1. However, considering the quantum leaps that other technologies have seen in the last 90 years I would think we could do a little better than a car that is slightly larger and slightly faster. It is frustrating that there has been very little active development of this technology until the last 5 years.
Maybe we could make better progress if we put the same amount of money into research as we are putting into tearing Alberta apart, invading foreign lands and poisoning our people and planet with pollution and CO2.
Didn’t the Model T get something like 25 mpg? And here we are with cars still getting the same, worse, or not much better.